U.S., Iraqis at odds over air strike details

The attack killed either 20 insurgents or up to 32 members of 2 families, including children

December 10, 2006|By Sabrina Tavernise, New York Times News Service. Reporting was contributed by Ali Adeeb, Khalid al-Ansary and Qais Mizher from Baghdad, and Iraqi employees of The New York Times from Dhuluiya and Basra.

BAGHDAD — The only thing that was clear from the accounts of Friday's air strike by U.S. forces north of Baghdad was that at least 20 Iraqis had been killed.

But typical of the fog of war here, American and Iraqi officials disagreed on just about every other point.

The U.S. military said that 20 people had been killed, including two women, and that they were all insurgents tied to Al Qaeda. Iraqi officials gave death tolls that ranged from 22 to 32, and said the deceased were two extended families that included as many as 10 children.

As the situation in Iraq deteriorates, counting deaths and the numbers of attacks here has become a difficult--and politically charged--business. The Iraqi government temporarily banned the release of casualty figures this fall, and the Iraq Study Group, which issued a report on the war this week in Washington, criticized the U.S. military for what it said was a chronic undercounting of attacks.

But an average day of violence shows just how difficult counting can be here, particularly in rural areas that are hard to reach like the site of Friday's strike, which occurred in Salahuddin, a predominantly Sunni province north of Baghdad.

The U.S. military described Friday's attack this way: The strike occurred before dawn, shortly after U.S. soldiers came under fire as they searched buildings. Soldiers fired back, killing two gunmen, but the shooting did not stop, and the Americans called in "close air support," which fired down on the area, killing 18 people. Two of those killed were women.

"Al Qaeda in Iraq has both men and women supporting and facilitating their operations, unfortunately," the military said in a statement. U.S. soldiers found a weapons cache that included machine guns, suicide vests and rocket-propelled grenades, the military said.

A military spokesman, Sgt. Sky Laron, declined to give the name of the village where the battle occurred but said it was 15 miles south of Samarra and 30 miles west of Balad.

That description matches the location of the town of Ishaqi, where local police officials earlier this year accused U.S. soldiers of killing civilians then covering it up with an air strike. The military investigated and later cleared the soldiers.

Two Iraqi officials--the governor of the province and an official from the administration of Ishaqi--said the strike had taken place in a village near Ishaqi, and that it had killed members of the extended families of two brothers, Muhammad Hussein al-Jalmood and Mahmood Hussein al-Jalmood.

A senior official in the Salahuddin governor's office said six children had been killed. Amer Alwan, the official from Ishaqi, put the number at 10.

Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a military spokesman, said that U.S. forces had entered the site after the strike and that they counted 20 bodies. None of them were children, he said.

An Iraqi satellite channel, Al Sharqiya, broadcast images from what it said was the scene of the strike, showing the twisted body of one child, who looked to be about 10. It also showed people digging in the rubble of a destroyed building and women crying next to corpses wrapped in colored blankets.

The official in the Salahuddin governor's office acknowledged that a fight appeared to have taken place, as investigators found empty bullet casings sprinkled near the site of the strike.

Alwan said nothing of a battle and contended that all those who were killed were civilians.

In southern Iraq, the British military said that more than 1,000 British and Danish troops raided villages north of Basra and arrested four Iraqis whom a spokesman identified as members of the Mahdi Army, a Shiite militia.

Three U.S. soldiers were killed Thursday, and two Marines were wounded, the U.S. military said.